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Sister and wife to Zeus, the white-armed goddess, the cow-eyed Queen of Heaven. Marriage is her sacred institution, and politics and political machinations, power and royalty are her spheres of influence. She became the minister over marriages due to their being the primary way in which power was aligned, shared, and distributed in the period in which the Scriptures were written, and the band of gold that has come to symbolize the commitment between two people originally symbolized the collaboration and accumulation of capital between two families. She protects the sanctity of marriage and condemns infidelity, though divorce and re-marriage are amply attested to in her cult rites.

Common History

Hera is the Queen of the Gods and is the wife and sister of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon. She is known for being the Goddess of Marriage & Birth. Despite being the Goddess of Marriage, she was known to be jealous and vengeful towards the many lovers and offspring of her husband Zeus.

Hera is married to her brother Zeus and is titled as the Queen of Heaven. One of her characteristics is her jealous and vengeful nature against Zeus's other lovers and offspring and against the mortals who cross her. Hera is commonly seen with the animals she considers sacred including the cow, lion and the peacock. Portrayed as majestic and solemn, often enthroned, and crowned with the polos (a high cylindrical crown worn by several of the Great Goddesses), Hera may hold a pomegranate in her hand, emblem of fertile blood and death and a substitute for the narcotic capsule of the opium poppy.[1] Scholar of Greek mythology Walter Burkert writes in Greek Religion, "Nevertheless, there are memories of an earlier aniconic representation, as a pillar in Argos and as a plank in Samos."[2]

Related Colony

Common Rituals

Cults and Sects

Hera may have been the first deity to whom the Greeks dedicated an enclosed roofed temple sanctuary, at Samos about 800 BCE. It was replaced later by the Heraion, one of the largest of all Greek temples (Greek altars were in front of the temples, under the open sky). There were many temples built on this site so evidence is somewhat confusing and archaeological dates are uncertain.

The temple created by the Rhoecus sculptors and architects was destroyed between 570-560 BCE. This was replaced by the Polycratean temple 540-530 BCE. In one of these temples we see a forest of 155 columns. There is also no evidence of tiles on this temple suggesting either the temple was never finished or that the temple was open to the sky.

Earlier sanctuaries, whose dedication to Hera is less certain, were of the Mycenaean type called "house sanctuaries".[12] Samos excavations have revealed votive offerings, many of them late 8th and 7th centuries BCE, which show that Hera at Samos was not merely a local Greek goddess of the Aegean: the museum there contains figures of gods and suppliants and other votive offerings from Armenia, Babylon, Iran, Assyria, Egypt, testimony to the reputation which this sanctuary of Hera enjoyed and to the large influx of pilgrims. Compared to this mighty goddess, who also possessed the earliest temple at Olympia and two of the great fifth and sixth century temples of Paestum, the termagant of Homer and the myths is an "almost…comic figure" according to Burkert.[13]

Hymn

I sing of golden-throned Hera whom Rhea bare. Queen of the immortals is she, surpassing all in beauty: she is the sister and the wife of loud-thundering Zeus, — the glorious one whom all the blessed throughout high Olympus reverence and honour even as Zeus who delights in thunder.